Good article! I'm going to hijack this comment section to raise a question: is memetic desire weakening with the mass personal communication of the internet?

I think that up until the 1990's you would identify more with an entire group. Are you a rebel? Then style your hair like this and wear these clothes; so much so that when someone sees you, they know exactly that you're a rebel.

But in the last twenty years, it seems that the internet has allowed us to pick and choose our memetic desires in a more fine-grained way. Instead of belonging to one group we are an amalgam of many groups, and you can no longer as easily look at someone and say, "That person is of the group 'x'."

And if so, doesn't this give us hope that while we are (if you agree with Girard's premise) not our own desires, we are more and more a unique collection of desires and that itself is more and more unique?